Every Winter Olympiad has taken place in February, with four of the earliest also covering a few days at the end of January. As such, the Winter Games have never been held in the Southern Hemisphere.

As they did on Monday, the Olympics come up often as Jeopardy! fodder. I’ve broken them up into smaller chunks to help you remember when and where the world’s best skiers, curlers, and bobsledders met.

Like the Summer Games, the Winter Olympics are counted using Roman numerals.

St. Moritz became the first two-time host city in 1948, twenty years after its first turn. Innsbruck and Lake Placid would eventually join it.

The 1948 installment was known as The V Olympic Winter Games. This was unlike the Summer Games, which counted the canceled events: Tokyo would have been The Games of the XII Olympiad; London, in 1944, would have been XIII. (London got the 1948 games, too, numbered 14th.)

Cortina d’Ampezzo, host city for the nixed 1944 Winter Games, got its chance twelve years later. Like Garmisch-Partenkirchen, this name is a candidate for rote memorization.

Thanks to the Squaw Valley Games, California is still the only state to host Olympics in both Summer (Los Angeles, 1932 & 1984) and Winter. Vice President Richard Nixon opened the Winter Games.

The Innsbruck Sandwich

#

Year

Host Country

Host City

IX

1964

Austria

Innsbruck

X

1968

France

Grenoble

XI

1972

Japan

Sapporo

XII

1976

Austria

Innsbruck

Mnemonic: I played chess at the first Inn before doing the Giant Slalom to the second Inn. Made it in time for the fireworks!

The two extra bits represent the years of the Innsbruck games: there are 64 squares on a chessboard, and the fireworks are in celebration of America’s bicentennial.

In fact, the 1976 Games were originally awarded to Denver, but Colorado voters rejected the public-financing terms. After the second-place finisher, Vancouver, turned down the IOC’s offer to host, there wasn’t much time left to plan, so a recent venue was the best option.

The Grenoble Games were the first broadcast in color. Allegedly to accommodate the additional equipment, there were three separate Athletes’ Villages, which angered many participants.

Big Brother stands in for 1984, the year Sarajevo hosted. The elevated judges’ platform for ski jumping was later used as a sniper’s nest during Yugoslavia’s civil war in the early 1990s. (Sarajevo is now the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina.)

And CALgary, ALbertville, and Lillehammer form a nice, easy-to-remember order.

The 1980 “Miracle on Ice” – the U.S. victory over the U.S.S.R. in the men’s ice hockey semifinals – took place on the Americans’ home turf. Rubbing salt in the wound, the United States would boycott that year’s Summer Games in Moscow.

Vice President Walter Mondale opened the second Lake Placid Games.

Regarding Lillehammer: The IOC HAMMERed it in two years after Albertville, to create even-ish spacing between the Winter and Summer Games. It was also the target of the Nancy Kerrigan knee-HAMMERing incident.

Just a year after Sochi, Russia is already struggling to make something out of its $51 billion price tag. The city hosted this year’s World Chess Championship, but, really – who wants to visit for fun?

The 2018 Games will be held in Pyeongchang, South Korea; the 2022 Games will be awarded this summer. After several candidates were scared off by the potentially prohibitive costs, the only two that submitted final bids this week were Almaty, Kazakhstan, and Beijing, China.